"We all know about the gadgets that get showered with constant praise - the icons, the segment leaders, and the game changers. Tech history will never forget the Altair 8800, the Walkman, the BlackBerry, and the iPhone. But people do forget - and quickly - about the devices that failed to change the world: the great ideas doomed by mediocre execution, the gadgets that arrived before the market was really ready, or the technologies that found their stride just as the world was pivoting to something else." I was a heavy user of BeOS, Zip drives, and MiniDisc (I was an MD user up until about 2 years ago). I'm starting to see a pattern here.

Yes, I wrote my MA stuff on one of those babies in 1993-1994; I recall that it had a fantastic clipboard that you could programme with up to 10 frequently used snippets, which I have never found bog standard anywhere since (and if someone wants to point out my tech myopia there, please let me know if this does exist somewhere else now!). I still have the disks somewhere and was tempted to hack a PCW 3" drive on a PC a la http://www.fvempel.nl/3pc.html even a little while back, just to retrieve all those hours of work.

For sheer productivity it did better than the PC Windows 3.11 machine I moved to for the start of my doctorate. Talk about no distractions!

I recall that it had a fantastic clipboard that you could programme with up to 10 frequently used snippets, which I have never found bog standard anywhere since (and if someone wants to point out my tech myopia there, please let me know if this does exist somewhere else now!).